University of Ibadan is the 600th best in the world!

Ibadan now has the 600th best university in the world – better than Ghana’s best

Even though it is contending numerous challenges, the University of Ibadan continues to scale hurdles nationally, ‘continentally’ and globally – the latest being its rank as the 600th best university in the world.

According to the recently released 2016/2017 ranking by Times Higher Education (THE), University of Ibadan emerged as the only Nigerian university that made it to the top 1,000 globally ranked universities. The ranking put into consideration teaching, research, citations of scholarly publications, industry income and international outlook.

It is worthy to note that University of Ibadan is the only Nigerian university that made the world’s top 1,000 list and it came behind South African universities such as University of Cape Town (148), Stellenbosch University (401) and University of KwaZulu Natal (501). University of Ibadan also ranked higher than the University of Ghana, Legon (601) which by the way is the only university from Ghana on the list.

On the overall, only 22 African universities made the list and they are mostly from South Africa and Egypt – suggesting that they are the two countries dominating education in Africa. But this does not take anything away from University of Ibadan’s feat as stressed by the institution’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Idowu Olayinka, who said the school has several world-class scholars that the nation needs to actively engage in order to solve its numerous problems.

He said: “The truth of the matter is that the Times Higher Education Rankings is one of the elite global ranking bodies. It is a thing of joy that we have a respectable position in comparison to peer universities in Africa. This is message to the Federal Government of Nigeria that we need funding to improve our research infrastructure and funding support in order to enhance productivity. We congratulate all faculty, staff and students who have made this feat possible. The Federal Government should learn to use research output from the University of Ibadan to solve problems facing the country. We cannot have world class scholars in Nigeria and rely on those who have never conducted researches on our problems to come and solve our problems.”